Morning Pageants

LP : Standard Black Vinyl 

CD : Standard CD

The West Midlands-born and London-based electronic duo ​Delmer Darion​ (Oliver Jack and Tom Lenton) release the final single ​‘Television’​ from their forthcoming debut album ‘Morning Pageants’, which is coming out on​ 16t​h​ October ​via ​Practise Music​. On ​‘Television’,​ Delmer Darion continue their explorations of the death of the devil, this time presenting him trapped within a Saturday morning cartoon in a suburban living room: “Back in the 80s, some Fundamentalist Christians like Pastor Gary Greenwald were preaching how cartoons like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe were turning children to Satan and the occult. That gave us this wonderful image of Satan curled up and imprisoned in the electron guns of old cathode ray tubes. We just thought, how far he’s fallen! Back in his day, pretty much everyone feared Satan’s ability to walk, talk, convey, possess, and just generally affect the physical world. But here, a small minority of loonies have him spinning morning cartoons for kids. It felt like the perfect symbol for the death of Satan in the collective consciousness.” Musically, it’s a beautiful break from the duo’s industrial-heavy electronics. Jittering drums build in series of improvised fills, sampled and sequenced, getting bigger but less steady as the song plays out.

A circling piano coda gently coils itself around alt-folk songwriter Genevieve Dawson’s guest vocals, and the repeated line from Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘The Auroras of Autumn’: “this is where the serpent lives”. Their debut album has been five years in the making: a sprawling ten-track account of the death of the devil as a tragedy for the imagination. A vast aural landscape is covered from the opening melodies coded in the constructed language of Solresol. When sequenced together, ​‘Morning Pageants’​ is shrouded in the same intricate noise of self-sampling and tape degradation. De-centred rhythmic assemblies of analogue drum machines play through a series of guitar pedals, thunderous bass swells from a self-oscillating filter feedback patch, and folk songs dissolve into thin air. Even if you’re not following the descent of the devil step by step through their unspooling archives, you’ll have little chance not to be transfixed.

1. 290 Recto
2. Darkening
3. Wildering
4. Narrowing
5. Lacuna
6. Pearse
7. Brossier
8. Genoa
9. St Louis
10. Television